Now it
was a strange music, which they could not understand--which the player
could understand as little as the rest--but it was soft and sweet, and
yet deep and bold, and the fairies trembled as they remembered the
holy Patrick and a mighty power in the worlds of the seen and of the
unseen. This passed away and the music came with the stir and the
swing of marching men, and the fairies were again in the days of King
Brian Boru, with Ireland free and brave and strong. It grew sad; it
gushed out like sobs from a broken heart; then it was quieter, but
still full of a softer sorrow; now it was merry and reckless. It made
the fairies remember all that they had ever seen in the lives of the
people whom they had known so long--the cruel hardship, war, sickness,
hunger, and then, besides, the faith, the kindliness, the
light-heartedness that had saved them through it all. There were tunes
that every man and woman in Ireland knows--tunes that you know--old
airs that every Irish fiddler or piper or singer learns from the older
ones, that the oldest ones of all learned, they say, from the fairies.
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